Seiko Epson (Epson)
Machinery : Industrial Robot : SCARA
Since its inception, Epson has passed down and expanded on its traditional strengths as a manufacturing company. Refining the company’s super-microprocessing and precision processing technologies in the development of its watches and then expanding those technologies into other fields led to rapid progress. The breakthrough came with the launch of the EP-101 (Electronic Printer), a popular and groundbreaking product that opened up new markets. It was in the hope of sending future “sons” of this EP out into the world that the Epson brand was founded in 1975. Ever since then, high quality, high-value-added “sons” have been introduced to the market to wide acclaim.
Assembly Line
Robots Automate Assembly of Auto Parts
AMG is Husco’s in-house factory automation arm. It designs and builds most of the manufacturing lines for Husco, and it recently began offering its services to outside clients as well.
While many manufacturers, including Husco, have been devoting more and more of their efforts to EVs, increasing the efficiency of internal combustion engines remains important. One crucial development has been the use of variable-force solenoids in car and truck engines. These small devices optimize the opening of the valves that let fuel and air into the cylinders at the heart of each engine, helping to increase both fuel efficiency and horsepower.To reach its goal, the plant would have to produce a fully assembled and tested solenoid every 6.1 seconds. To make that possible, the AMG team developed a modular automated assembly system consisting of a pallet-transfer conveyor and 10 Epson SCARA robots for most of the material handling. They settled on one Epson G6, two G3, and seven T-Series systems.
Husco and AMG most often use Epson T-Series robots for pick and place operations, but upgrade to the G-Series when they need higher speed and accuracy.
🦾 How to Address Tradeoffs in Robot Performance
Innovations in robotic automation have allowed manufacturers in countless industries to achieve higher throughput, improved quality, and safer working environments. But choosing a robot for an automation task often involves balancing tradeoffs between three key performance criteria: speed, payload, and precision. In other words, to achieve high precision, a user may have to sacrifice somewhat on the application’s speed and payload. Alternatively, if the robot’s payload is increased, the operating speed may need to be reduced. The underlying cause of these performance tradeoffs is vibration of the robot arm.